The images of Murmurations were so mesmerizing, that Tapscott’s voice got lost in the background, while we witnessed what is clear evidence of a profound operating principle of the Universe:

“The emergence of complex behaviour in leaderless environments”

In this particular case, Starlings joins in groups composed of hundreds-of-thousands of individuals, and in the absence of centralized control and devoid of a social hierarchical structure, display behaviours can easily be interpreted as those of a macro-organism whose cells are the individual birds.

See in particular, at [0:55] of the video above, how the macro-group evolves protrusions that attack a predator bird, which is much larger than any of the individual Starlings, but that becomes minuscule compared to the macro-group.

Attempts at modelling and understanding this type of group behaviour have been made, for example in this article:

This last video below could easily be entitled:“Murmuration versus Predator”and should lead us to question everything we think we know about organizations, and the effectiveness of command and control structures.

There is something in a Murmuration that is reminiscent of the behavioural power of Open Source communities.